Code Theory: Basil Bernstein

Basil Bernstein (1924–2000) was a North London schoolteacher turned sociologist of education, appointed to the Karl Mannheim Chair of Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education at the University of London. From the 1960s on, he sought to describe the principles underlying the perpetuation and change of class relations by the family and the school. In a series of five volumes, collectively titled Class, Codes and Control, he progressively developed his theory in dialogue with the work of his students. A theory of the code is central to this work. This entry discusses the development of code theory and Bernstein’s ideas about sociolinguistic and educational codes.

A code in common usage is a covert translation or regulation device linking features in two different contexts. “Cracking the code” entails making visible the principles of the translation device so that one is able to “read” the features of one context in terms of the features of the other. The “genetic code,” for example, allows one to read the relation between personal attributes and one’s genetic inheritance. To [Page 139]grasp what is translated or regulated by Bernstein’s educational code, three of Bernstein’s intellectual forebears merit a brief comment.

After the anthropologist Mary Douglas, an ardent admirer, Bernstein was the most important Durkheimian scholar to come from England. He shared Émile Durkheim’s project of understanding how macrosocial relations—the division of labor—both shaped and were shaped by symbolic cultural forms and forms of consciousness through the institutions of the church, family, and school. Bernstein also became steeped in the structuralist and poststructuralist European intellectual currents of the 1960s and 1970s, sharing with them a desire to render legible the invisible social pattern and an inclination to abstraction and formalism, which some readers found off-putting. Paul Atkinson has pointed to the influence of Ferdinand de Saussure, but one could equally point to Noam Chomsky, Jean Piaget, A. R. Luria, and Lev Vygotsky, and also to his intellectual comrade, the linguist Michael Halliday. To conclude that Bernstein was therefore a “structuralist,” as many have done, is erroneous. He was also influenced by symbolic interactionism, and in common with the sociologies of his time, his aim was to give an account of the principles of the code in terms of both the structural dimension (hence “class”) and the interactional or communication dimension (hence “control”).

There are two principal phases of the development of code theory, the first concentrating on the principles of communication generating different “orientations to meaning” (or different sociolinguistic codes) in young children, the second broadening the theory to account for educational communication in general. In the latter development, the theory is refined to show how coding principles vary and how these variations can be formally modeled.